The Abolition Of Man

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Lewis

The abolition of man

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THE ABOLITION OF MAN

UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM
RIDDELL MEMORIAL LECTURES

Fifteenth Series

.JUft l 3 1956

THE

ABOLITION OF MAN

OR

REFLECTIONS ON EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL
REFERENCE TO THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
IN THE UPPER FORMS OF SCHOOLS

BY

C. S. LEWIS

The Master said, He who sets to work on a different strand
destroys the whole fabric. — Confucius, Analects 11. 16.

C HUR CH

V k .,. . UHW BWATtAMt

NEW YORK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

*947

Copyright, 1947, by
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

All rights reserved — no part of this book may be
reproduced in any form without permission in writ-
ing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a
review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.

First Printing

hinted in the united states or ameeica

BY THE VAIL-B ALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N. Y.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Men without Chests i

II. The Way 17

III. The Abolition of Man 34

Appendix — Illustrations of the Tao . . . .51

I

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS

So he sent the word to slay
And slew the little childer.

Carol

I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the impor-
tance of elementary text-books. That is why I have chosen
as the starting-point for these lectures a little book on
English intended for 'boys and girls in the upper forms of
schools.’ I do not think the authors of this book (there were
two of them) intended any harm, and I owe them, or their
publisher, good language for sending me a complimentary
copy. At the same time I shall have nothing good to say of
them. Here is a pretty predicament. I do not want to pillory
two modest practising school-masters who were doing the
best they knew: but I cannot be silent about what I think
the actual tendency of their work. I therefore propose to
conceal their names. I shall refer to these gentlemen as Gaius
and Titius and to their book as The Green Book. But I
promise you there is such a book and I have it on my shelves.

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-
known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember
that there were two tourists present: that one called it ‘sub-
lime’ and the other ‘pretty’: and that Coleridge mentally
endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with

i

2 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: ‘When the
man said That is sublime, he appeared to be making a re-
mark about the waterfall. . . . Actually ... he was not
making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his
own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings
associated in my mind with the word “ Sublime or shortly, 1
have sublime feelings' Here are a good many deep questions
settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not
yet finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present
in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something
very important about something: and actually we are only
saying something about our own feelings.’ 1

Before considering the issues really raised by this momen-
tous little paragraph (designed, you will remember, for ‘the
upper forms in schools’) we must eliminate one mere con-
fusion into which Gaius and Titius have fallen. Even on
their own view — on any conceivable view — the man who
says This is sublime cannot mean I''mve sublime feelings.
Even if it were granted that such qualities as sublimity were
simply and solely projected into things from our own
emotions, yet the emotions which prompt the projection are
the correlatives, and therefore almost the opposites, of the
qualities projected. The feelings which make a man call an
object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of vener-
ation. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement
about the speaker’s feelings, the proper translation would be
I have humble feelings. If the view held by Gaius and Titius
were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurd-
ities. It would force them to maintain that You are con-
temptible means I have contemptible feelings : in fact that
Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are con-
temptible. But we need not delay over this which is the very
1 The Green Book, pp. 19, 20.

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS 3

pons asinorum of our subject. It would be unjust to Gaius
and Titius themselves to emphasize what was doubtless a
mere inadvertence.

The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book
will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences
containing a predicate of value are statements about the
emotional state of the speaker, and, secondly, that all such
statements are unimportant. It is true that Gaius and Titius
have said neither of these things in so many words. They
have treated only one particular predicate of value (sub-
lime) as a word descriptive of the speaker’s emotions. The
pupils are left to do for themselves the work of extending
the same treatment to all predicates of value: and no slight-
est obstacle to such extension is placed in their way. The
authors may or may not desire the extension: they may
never have given the question five minutes’ serious thought
in their lives. I am not concerned with what they desired
but with the effect their book will certainly have on the
schoolboy’s mind. In the same way, they have not said that
judgements of value are unimportant. Their words are that
we 1 appear to be saying something very important’ when in
reality w'e are ‘only saying something about our own feel-
ings.’ No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion
brought to bear upon him by that word only. I do not
mean, of course, that he will make any conscious inference
from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that
all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of
Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing
with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English
prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics
are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but
an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten
and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

4

side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a
controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly
know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know
what is being done to him.

Before considering the philosophical credentials of the
position which Gaius and Titius have adopted about value,
I should like to show its practical results on their educa-
tional procedure. In their fourth chapter they quote a silly
advertisement of a pleasure cruise and proceed to inoculate
their pupils against the sort of writing it exhibits . 2 The ad-
vertisement tells us that those who buy tickets for this cruise
will go ‘across the Western Ocean where Drake of Devon
sailed,’ ‘adventuring after the treasures of the Indies,’ and
bringing home themselves also a ‘treasure’ of ‘golden hours’
and ‘glowing colours.’ It is a bad bit of writing, of course:
a venal and bathetic exploitation of those emotions of awe
and pleasure which men feel in visiting places that have
striking associations with history or legend. If Gaius and
Titius were to stick to their last and teach their readers (as
they promised to do) the art of English composition, it was
their business to put this advertisement side by side with
passages from great writers in which the very same emotion
is well expressed, and then show where the difference lies.
They might have used Johnson’s famous passage from the
Western Islands, which concludes: ‘That man is little to be
envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain
of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among
the ruins of Iona .’ 3 They might have taken that place in
The Prelude where Wordsworth describes how the an-
tiquity of London first descended on his mind with ‘Weight
and power, Power growing under weight.’ * A lesson which

2 Ibid., p. J3_

* foumey to the Western Islands. Inch Kenneth *

4 The Frelude } viii, U. 549-59.

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS 5

had laid such literature beside the advertisement and really
discriminated the good from the bad would have been a
lesson worth teaching. There would have been some blood
and sap in it the trees of knowledge and of life growing
together. It would also have had the merit of being a lesson
in literature: a subject of which Gaius and Titius, despite
their professed purpose, are uncommonly shy. What they
actually do is to point out that the luxurious motor-vessel
won t really sail where Drake did, that the tourists will not
ha.ve any adventures, that the treasures they bring home
will be of a purely metaphorical nature, and that a trip to
Margate might provide ‘all the pleasure and rest’ they re-
quired . 5 All this is very true: talents inferior to those of
Gaius and Titius would have sufficed to discover it. What
they have not noticed, or not cared about, is that a very simi-
lar treatment could be applied to much good literature
which treats the same emotion. What, after all, can the
history of early British Christianity, in pure reason, add to
the motives for piety as they exist in the eighteenth century?
Why should Mr. Wordsworth’s inn be more comfortable
or the air of London more healthy because London has
existed for a long time? Or, if there is indeed any obstacle
which will prevent a critic from ‘debunking’ Johnson and
Wordsworth (and Lamb, and Virgil, and Thomas Browne,
and Mr. de la Mare) as The Green Book debunks the ad-
vertisement, Gaius and Titius have given their schoolboy
readers no faintest help to its discovery. From this passage
the schoolboy will learn about literature precisely nothing.
What he will learn quickly enough, and perhaps indelibly,
is the belief that all emotions aroused by local association
are in themselves contrary to reason and contemptible. He
will have no notion that there are two ways of being im-

5 The Green Book , , pp. 53-5.

6

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

mune to such an advertisement — that it falls equally flat on
those who are above it and those who are below it, on the
man of real sensibility and on the mere trousered ape who
has never been able to conceive the Atlantic as anything
more than so many million tons of cold salt water. There are
two men to whom we offer in vain a false leading article on
patriotism and honour: one is the coward, the other is the
honourable and patriotic man. None of this is brought be-
fore the schoolboy’s mind. On the contrary, he is en-
couraged to reject the lure of the ‘Western Ocean’ on the
very dangerous ground that in so doing he will prove him-
self a knowing fellow who can’t be bubbled out of his cash.
Gaius and Titius, while teaching him nothing about letters,
have cut out of his soul, long before he is old enough to
choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which
thinkers of more authority than they have held to be gen-
erous, fruitful, and humane.

But it is not only Gaius and Titius. In another little book,
whose author I will call Orbilius, I find that the same opera-
tion, under the same general anaesthetic, is being carried out.
Orbilius chooses for ‘debunking’ a silly bit of writing on
horses, where these animals are praised as the ‘willing ser-
vants’ of the early colonists in Australia . 6 And he falls into
the same trap as Gaius and Titius. Of Ruksh and Sleipnir
and the weeping horses of Achilles and the war-horse in
the Book of Job — nay even of Brer Rabbit and of Peter Rab-
bit — of man’s prehistoric piety to ‘our brother the ox’ — of all
that this semi-anthropomorphic treatment of beasts has
meant in human history and of the literature where it finds
noble or piquant expression — he has not a word to say . 7 Even

6 Orbilius’ book, p. 5.

7 Orbilius is so far superior to Gaius and Titius that he does (pp, 19-22)
contrast a piece of good writing on animals with the piece condemned.
Unfortunately, however, the only superiority he really demonstrates in

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS 7

of the problems of animal psychology as they exist for
science he says nothing. He contents himself with explaining
that horses are not, secundum litteram, interested in colonial
expansion . 8 This piece of information is really all that his
pupils get from him. Why the composition before them is
bad, when others that lie open to the same charge are good,
they do not hear. Much less do they learn of the two classes
of men who are, respectively above and below the danger
of such writing — the man who really knows horses and
really loves them, not with anthropomorphic illusions, but
with ordinate love, and the irredeemable urban blockhead to
whom a horse is merely an old-fashioned means of transport.
Some pleasure in their own ponies and dogs they will have
lost: some incentive to cruelty or neglect they will have
received: some pleasure in their own knowingness will
have entered their minds. That is their day’s lesson in
English, though of English they have learned nothing.
Another little portion of the human heritage has been
quietly taken from them before they were old enough to
understand.

I have hitherto been assuming that such teachers as Gaius
and Titius do not fully realize what they are doing and do
not intend the far-reaching consequences it will actually
have. There is, of course, another possibility. What I have
called (presuming on their concurrence in a certain tra-
ditional system of values) the ‘trousered ape’ and the ‘urban
blockhead’ may be precisely the kind of man they really

the second extract is its superiority in factual truth. The specifically liter-
ary problem (the use and abuse of expressions which are false secundum
litteram) is not tackled. Orbilius indeed tells us (p. 97) that we must ‘learn
to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate figurative statement, 5 but
he gives us very little help in doing so. At the same time it is fair to
record my opinion that his work is on quite a different level from The
Green Book .

* Ibid, p. 9.

8

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

wish to produce. The differences between us may go all the
way down. They may really hold that the ordinary human
feelings about the past or animals or large waterfalls are
contrary to reason and contemptible and ought to be eradi-
cated. They may be intending to make a clean sweep of
traditional values and start with a new set. That position
will be discussed later. If it is the position which Gaius and
Titius are holding, I must, for the moment, content myself
with pointing out that it is a philosophical and not a literary
position. In filling their book with it they have been unjust
to the parent or headmaster who buys it and who has got
the work of amateur philosophers where he expected the
work of professional grammarians. A man would be an-
noyed if his son returned from the dentist with his teeth
untouched and his head crammed with the dentist’s obiter
dicta on bimetallism or the Baconian theory.

But I doubt whether Gaius and Titius have really
planned, under cover of teaching English, to propagate their
philosophy. I think they have slipped into it for the follow-
ing reasons. In the first place, literary criticism is difficult,
and what they actually do is very much easier. To explain
why a bad treatment of some basic human emotion is bad
literature is, if we exclude all question-begging attacks on
the emotion itself, a very hard thing to do. Even Dr. Rich-
ards, who first seriously tackled the problem of badness in
literature, failed, I think, to do it. To ‘debunk’ the emotion,
on the basis of a commonplace rationalism, is within almost
anyone’s capacity. In the second place, I think Gaius and
Titius may have honestly misunderstood the pressing ed-
ucational need of the moment. They see the world around
them swayed by emotional propaganda — they have learned
from tradition that youth is sentimental — and they conclude
that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of

9

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS

young people against emotion. My own experience as a
teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs
to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three
who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity.
The task of the modem educator is not to cut down jungles
but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false senti-
ments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensi-
bility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the
propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be
avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against
a soft head.

But there is a third, and a profounder, reason for the pro-
cedure which Gaius and Titius adopt. They may be per-
fectly ready to admit that a good education should build
some sentiments while destroying others. They may endeav-
our to do so. But it is impossible that they should succeed.
Do what they will, it is the ‘debunking’ side of their work,
and this side alone, which will really tell. In order to grasp
this necessity clearly I must digress for a moment to show
that what may be called the educational predicament of
Gaius and Titius is different from that of all their prede-
cessors. *

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men
believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reac-
tions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous
to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive,
but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence,
or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with
the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed
with the one who called it pretty was of course that he be-
lieved inanimate nature to be such that certain responses
could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than
others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists

IO

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime
was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about
it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited
those emotions. But for this claim there would be nothing
to agree or disagree about. To disagree with This is pretty
if those words simply described the lady’s feelings, would
be absurd: if she had said 1 feel sick Coleridge would hardly
have replied No; l feel quite well. When Shelley, having
compared the human sensibility to an Aeolian lyre, goes on
to add that it differs from a lyre in having a power of
‘internal adjustment’ whereby it can ‘accommodate its
chords to the motions of that which strikes them,’ 9 he is as-
suming the same belief. ‘Can you be righteous,’ asks Tra-
herne, ‘unless you be just in rendering to things their due
esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were
made to prize them according to their value.’ 10 St. Augus-
tine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of
the affections in which every object is accorded that kind
and degree of love which is appropriate to it. 11 Aristotle says
that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dis-
like what he ought. 12 When the age for reflective thought
comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate
affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first prin-
ciples in Ethics: but to the corrupt man they will never be
visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. 18
Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal
will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained
to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things
which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hate-
ful. 14 In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who
would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made

9 Defence of Poetry. 10 Centuries of Meditations , L 12.

11 De Civ. Dei, xv. 22. Cf. ibid. ix. 5. xi. 28.

12 Eth Nic. 1104 b, 1S Ibid. 1095 b. ^ Laws, 6 $ 3.

ir

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS

works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just
distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest
years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving
it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes
a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to
reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then,
bred, as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome
and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’ 15
In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called
good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in,
the Rtd that great ritual or pattern of nature and super-
nature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral
virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness,
correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with
satya or truth, correspondence to reality. As Plato said that
the Good was ‘beyond existence’ and Wordsworth that
through virtue the stars were strong, so the Indian masters
say that the gods themselves are born of the Rta and obey
it. 18 The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest
thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates,
the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature,
it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe
goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly
and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which
every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and
supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that
great exemplar. 17 ‘In ritual,’ say the Analects, ‘it is harmony
with Nature that is prized.’ 18 The ancient Jews likewise
praise the Law as being ‘true.’ 19

15 Republic, 402 a.

* 6 A. B. Keith, s.v. ‘Righteousness (Hindu).’ Enc . Religion and Ethics,
vol. x.

17 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 454 b; iv. 12 B; ix. 87 a.

18 The Analects of Confucius , trans. Arthur Waley, London, 1938, i. 12.

18 Psalm carix. 151. The word is emeth, ‘truth.’ Where the Satya of the

iz THE ABOLITION OF MAN

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian,
Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer
to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao .’ Some of the accounts of
it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you
merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to
them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine
of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really
true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe
is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao
can hold that to call children delightful or old men vener-
able is not simply to record a psychological fact about our
own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to rec-
ognize a quality which demands a certain response from
us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the
society of small children: because I speak from within the
Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself — just as a man
may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind.
And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus rec-
ognitions of objective value or responses to an objective
order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with
reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved)
or out of harmony With reason (when we perceive that
liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a
judgement: in that sense all emotions and sentiments are
alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they
conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes
the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

Over against this stands the world of The Green Book. In

Indian sources emphasizes truth as ‘correspondence,’ emeth (connected
with a verb that means ‘to be firm’) emphasizes rather the reliability or
trustworthiness of truth. Faithfulness and permanence are suggested by
Hebraists as alternative renderings. Emeth is that which does not deceive,
does not ‘give,’ does not change, that which holds water. (See T. K.
Cheyne in Encyclopedia Biblica, 1914, s.v. ‘Truth.’)

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS 13

it the very possibility of a sentiment being reasonable — or
even unreasonable — has been excluded from the outset. It
can be reasonable or unreasonable only if it conforms or
fails to conform to something else. To say that the cataract
is sublime means saying that our emotion of humility is ap-
propriate or ordinate to the reality, and thus to speak of
something else besides the emotion: just as to say that a shoe
fits is to speak not only of shoes but of feet. But this ref-
erence to something beyond the emotion is what Gaius
and Titius exclude from every sentence containing a predi-
cate of value. Such statements, for them, refer solely to the
emotion. Now the emotion, thus considered by itself, can-
not be either in agreement or disagreement with Reason. It
is irrational not as a paralogism is irrational, but as a physical
event is irrational: it does not rise even to the dignity of
error. On this view, the world of facts, without one trace
of value, and the world of feelings without one trace of
truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another,
and no rapprochement is possible.

Hence the educational problem is wholly different accord-
ing as you stand within or without the Tao. For those with-
in, the task is to train in the pupil those responses which are
in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them
or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists.
Those without, if they are logical, must regard all senti-
ments as equally non-rational, as mere mists between us and
the real objects. As a result, they must either decide to re-
move all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil’s
mind: or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that
have nothing to do with their intrinsic ‘justness’ or ‘ordinacy.’
The latter course involves them in the questionable process
of creating in others by ‘suggestion’ or incantation a mirage
which- their own reason has successfully dissipated.

14

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

Perhaps this will become clearer if we take a concrete
instance. When a Roman father told his son that it was a
sweet and seemly thing to die for his country, he believed
what he said. He was communicating to the son an emotion
which he himself shared and which he believed to be in
accord with the value which his judgement discerned in
noble death. He was giving the boy the best he had, giving
of his spirit to humanize him as he had given of his body to
beget him. But Gaius and Titius cannot believe that in call-
ing such a death sweet and seemly they would be saying
‘something important about something.’ Their own method
of debunking would cry out against them if they attempted
to do so. For death is not something to eat and therefore
cannot be dulce in the literal sense, and it is unlikely that
the real sensations preceding it will be dulce even by anal-
ogy. And as for decorum — that is only a word describing
how some other people will feel about your death when
they happen to think of it, which won’t be often, and will
certainly do you no good. There are only two courses open
to Gaius and Titius. Either they must go the whole way and
debunk this sentiment like any other, or must set themselves
to work to produce, from outside, a sentiment which they
believe to be of no value to the pupil and which may cost
him his life, because it is useful to us (the survivors) that
our young men should feel it. If they embark on this course
the difference between the old and the new education will
be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new
merely ‘conditions.’ The old dealt with its pupils as grown
birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly:
the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals
with young birds — making them thus or thus for purposes
of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS 15

a kind of propagation — men transmitting manhood to men:
the new is merely propaganda.

It is to their credit that Gaius and Titius embrace the
first alternative. Propaganda is their abomination: not be-
cause their own philosophy gives a ground for condemning
it (or anything else) but because they are better than their
principles. They probably have some vague notion (I will
examine it in my next lecture) that valour and good faith
and justice could be sufficiently commended to the pupil
on what they would call ‘rational’ or ‘biological’ or ‘modem’
grounds, if it should ever become necessary. In the mean-
time, they leave the matter alone and get on with the busi-
ness of debunking.

But this course, though less inhuman, is not less disastrous
than the opposite alternative of cynical propaganda. Let us
suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be
theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It
still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable
a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions
the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had
sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical
about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not
cheat,’ than against an irreproachable moral philosopher
who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is
not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and
muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.
The crbdest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would
wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be
of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the
king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule
the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element .’ 20 The
20 Republic, 442 b. c.

16 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

head rules the belly through the chest — the seat, as Alanus
tells us, of Magnanimity , 21 of emotions organized by trained
habit into stable sentiments. The Chest — Magnanimity —
Sentiment — these are the indispensable liaison officers be-
tween cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said
that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his
intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce
what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage
that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals.
This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them
attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished
from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor
any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be
strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a
nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained
without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could
debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought
but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them
out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the
atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our sit-
uation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we
are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical
without coming across the statement that what our civiliza-
tion needs is more ‘drive,’ or dynamism, or self-sacrifice,
or ‘creativity.’ In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove
the organ and demand the function. We make men without
chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh
at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We
castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

21 Alanus ab Insulis. De Planctu Naturae Prosa, in.

II

THE WAY

It is upon the Trunk that a gentleman works.

Analects of Confucius , i . 2.

The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green
Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.
But this is not necessarily a refutation of subjectivism about
values as a theory. The true doctrine might be a doctrine
which if we accept we die. No one who speaks from within
the Tap could reject it on that account; h Bl koL oAca-o-ov.
But it has not yet come to that. There are theoretical diffi-
culties in the philosophy of Gaius and Titius.

However subjective they may be about some traditional
values, Gaius and Titius have shown by the very act of writ-
ing The Green Book that there must be some other values
about which they are not sub j ective at all. They write in order
to produce certain states of mind in the rising generation, if
not because they think those states of mind intrinsically just
or good, yet certainly because they think them to be the
means to some state of society which they regard as desirable.
It would not be difficult to collect from various passages in
The Green Book what their ideal is. But we need npt. The
important point is not the precise nature of their end, but the
fact that they have an end at all. They must have, or their
book (being purely practical in intention) is written to no

J 7

18 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

purpose. And this end must have real value in their eyes. To
abstain from calling it ‘good’ and to use, instead, such predi-
cates as ‘necessary’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘efficient’ would be a
subterfuge. They could be forced by argument to answer the
questions ‘necessary for what?’, ‘progressing towards what?’,
‘effecting what?’; in the last resort they would have to admit
that some state of affairs was in their opinion good for its own
sake. And this time they could not maintain that ‘good’ simply
described their own emotions about it. For the whole purpose
of their book is so to condition the young reader that he will
share their approval, and this would be either a fool’s or a vil-
lain’s undertaking unless they held that their approval was in
some way valid or correct. In actual fact Gaius and Titius
will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism,
the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue
among moderately educated young men of the professional
classes during the period between the two wars . 1 Their scepti-
cism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other
people’s values: about the values current in their own set they

iThe real (perhaps unconscious) philosophy of Gaius and Titius be-
comes clear ir we contrast the two following lists of disapprovals and
approvals. A. Disapprovals: A mother’s appeal to a child to be ‘brave’ is
‘nonsense’ ( Green Book , p. 62). The reference of the word ‘gentleman’ is
‘extremely vague’ (ibid.). ‘To call a man a coward tells us really nothing
about what he does’ (p. 64). Feelings about a country or empire are feel-
ings ‘about nothing in particular’ (p. 77). B. Approvals: Those who prefer
the arts of peace to the arts of war (it is not said in what circumstances)
are such that ‘we may want to call them wise men’ (p. 65). The pupil is
expected ‘to believe in a democratic community life’ (p. 67). ‘Contact with
the ideas of other people is, as we know, healthy’ (p. 86) . The reason for
bathrooms (‘that people are healthier and pleasanter to meet when they
are clean’) is ‘too obvious to need mentioning’ (p. 142), It will be seen
that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street in peace-time,
are the ultimate values: those things which can alone produce or spiritual-
ize^ comfort and security are mocked. Man lives by bread alone, and the
ultimate source of bread is the baker’s van: peace matters more than
honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonete and reading news-
papers.

THE WAY 19

are not nearly sceptical enough. And this phenomenon is
very usual. A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or
(as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the back-
ground values of their own which they believe to be immune
from the debunking process. They claim to be cutting away
the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and in-
herited taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ values may
emerge. I will now try to find out what happens if this is
seriously attempted.

Let us continue to use the previous example — that of death
for a good cause — not, of course, because virtue is the only
value or martyrdom the only virtue, but because this is the
experimentum crucis which shows different systems of
thought in the clearest light. Let us suppose that an Innovator
in values regards dulce et decorum and greater love hath no
man as mere irrational sentiments which are to be stripped
off in order that we may get down to the ‘realistic’ or ‘basic’
ground of this value. Where will he find such a ground?

First of all, he might say that the real value lay in the utility
of such sacrifice to the community. ‘Good,’ he might say,
£ means what is useful to the community.’ But of course the
death of the community is not useful to the community —
only the death of some of its members. What is really meant
is that the death of some men is useful to other men. That is
very true. But on what ground are some men being asked to
die for the benefit of others? Every appeal to pride, honour,
shame, or love is excluded by hypothesis. To use these would
be to return to sentiment and the Innovator’s task is, having
cut all that away, to explain to men, in terms of pure reason-
ing, why they will be well advised to die that others may live.
He may say ‘Unless some of us risk death all of us are certain
to die.’ But that will be true only in a limited number of cases;
and even when it is true it provokes the very reasonable

20

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

counter question ‘Why should I be one of those who take the
risk?’

At this point the Innovator may ask why, after all, selfish-
ness should be more ‘rational’ or ‘intelligent’ than altruism.
The question is welcome. If by Reason we mean the process
actually employed by Gaius and Titius when engaged in de-
bunking (that is, the connecting by inference of propositions,
ultimately derived from sense data, with further proposi-
tions), then the answer must be that a refusal to sacrifice
oneself is no more rational than a consent to do so. And no
less rational. Neither choice is rational — or irrational — at
all. From propositions about fact alone no practical con-
clusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot
lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be
preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly
to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or
an acknowledged duty of self preservation. The Innovator is
trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of
premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues
trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is im-
possible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason
to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and
confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved
(though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort
that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but
are rationality itself: or else we must give up at once, and for
ever, the attempt to find a core of ‘rational’ value behind all
the sentiments we have debunked. The Innovator will not
take the first alternative, for practical principles known to
all men by Reason are simply the T ao which he has set out to
supersede. He is more likely to give up the quest for a
‘rational’ core and to hunt for some other ground even more
‘basic’ and ‘realistic.’

21

THE WAY

This he will probably feel that he has found in Instinct.
The preservation of society, and of the species itself, are ends
that do not hang on the precarious thread of Reason: they are
given by Instinct. That is why there is no need to argue
against the man who does not acknowledge them. We have
an instinctive urge to preserve our own species. That is why
men ought to work for posterity. We have no instinctive urge
to keep promises or to respect individual life: that is why
scruples of justice and humanity — in fact the Tao — can be
properly swept away when they conflict with our real end,
the preservation of the species. That, again, is why the
modem situation permits and demands a new sexual morality:
the old taboos served some real purpose in helping to pre-
serve the species, but contraceptives have modified this and
we can now abandon many of the taboos. For of course sexual
desire, being instinctive, is to be gratified whenever it does
not conflict with the preservation of the species. It looks, in
fact, as if an ethics based on instinct will give the Innovator
all he wants and nothing that he does not want.

In reality we have not advanced one step. I will not insist
on the point that Instinct is a name for we know not what (to
say that migratory birds find their way by instinct is only to
say that we do not know how migratory birds find their
way) , for I think it is here being used in a fairly definite sense,
to mean an unreflective or spontaneous impulse widely felt
by the members of a given species. In what way does Instinct,
thus conceived, help us to find 'real’ values? Is it maintained
that we must obey instinct, that we cannot do otherwise?
But if so, why are Green Books and the like written? Why
this stream of exhortation to drive us where we cannot help
going? Why such praise for those who have submitted to the
inevitable? Or is it maintained that if we do obey instinct we
shall be happy and satisfied? But the very question we are

21

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

considering was that of facing death which (so far as the
Innovator knows) cuts off every possible satisfaction: and if
we have an instinctive desire for the good of posterity then
this desire, by the very nature of the case, can never be
satisfied, since its aim is achieved, if at all, when we are dead.
It looks very much as if the Innovator would have to say not
that we must obey instinct, nor that it will satisfy us to do so,
but that we ought to obey instinct . 2

2 The most determined effort ‘which I know to construct a theory of
value on the basis of ‘satisfaction of impulses’ is that of Dr. I. A. Richards
(Principles of Literary Criticism , 1924). The old objection to defining
Value as Satisfaction is the universal value judgement that ‘it is better
to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.’ To meet this Dr. Richards
endeavours to show that our impulses can be arranged in a hierarchy and
some satisfactions preferred to others without an appeal to any criterion
other than satisfaction. He does this by the doctrine that some impulses
are more ‘important’ than others— an important impulse being one whose
frustration involves the frustration of other impulses. A good systematiza-
tion (i.e. the good life) consists in satisfying as many impulses as possible*,
which entails satisfying the ‘important’ at the expense of the ‘unimportant.*
The objections to this scheme seem to me to be two. (1) Without a
theory of immortality it leaves no room for the value of noble death. It
may, of course, be said that a man who has saved his life by treachery will
suffer for the rest of that life from frustration. But not, surely, frustration
of all his impulses? Whereas the dead man will have no satisfaction. Or is
it maintained that since he has no unsatisfied impulses he is better off
than the disgraced and living man? This at once raises the second objec-
tion. (2) Is the value of a systematization to be judged by the presence of
satisfactions or the absence of dissatisfactions? The extreme case is that
of the dead man in whom satisfactions and dissatisfactions (on the modem
view) both equal zero, as against the successful traitor who can still eat,
drink, sleep, scratch, and copulate, even if he cannot have friendship or
love or self-respect. But it arises at other levels. Suppose A has only 500
impulses and all are satisfied, and that B has 1,200 impulses whereof 700
are satisfied and 500 not: which has the better systematization? There is
no doubt which Dr. Richards actually prefers — he even praises art on the
ground that it makes us ‘discontented’ with ordinary crudities! (op. cit.,
p. 230). The only trace I find of a philosophical basis for this preference
is the statement that ‘the more complex an activity the more conscious it
is’ (p. 109). But if satisfaction is the only value, why should increase of
consciousness be good? For consciousness is the condition of all dissatis-
factions as well as of all satisfactions. Dr. Richards’ system gives no sup-

E ort to his (and our) actual preference for civil life over savage and
uman over animal — or even for life over death.

THE WAY 23

But why ought we to obey instinct? Is there another in-
stinct of a higher order directing us to do so, and a third of a
still higher order directing us to obey it ? — an infinite regress
of instincts? This is presumably impossible, but nothing else
will serve. From the statement about psychological fact ‘I
have an impulse to do so and so’ we cannot by any ingenuity
derive the practical principle £ I ought to obey this impulse.’
Even if it were true that men had a spontaneous, unreflective
impulse to sacrifice their own lives for the preservation of
their fellows, it remains a quite separate question whether
this is an impulse they should control or one they should
indulge. For even the Innovator admits that many impulses
(those which conflict with the preservation of the species)
have to be controlled. And this admission surely introduces
us to a yet more fundamental difficulty.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey
‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our
instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving
the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other
instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To
listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding
it in its own favour would be rather simple minded. Each
instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the
expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one
rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If
we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowl-
edge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it
from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive:
the judge cannot be one of the parties judged: or, if he is, the
decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the
preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual
appetite.

The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than

2 4 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for prefer-
ring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at
useless words: we call it the ‘basic,’ or ‘fundamental,’ or
‘primal,’ or ‘deepest’ instinct. It is of no avail. Either these
words conceal a value judgement passed upon the instinct and
therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its
felt intensity, the frequency of its operation, and its wide dis-
tribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon
instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations
about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to
no practical conclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the
premisses already concealed an imperative or the conclusion
remains merely in the indicative . 3

3 The desperate expedients to which a man can be driven if he attempts
to base value on fact are well illustrated by Dr. C. H. Waddington’s fate
in Science and Ethics . Dr. Waddington here explains that ‘existence is its
own justification’ (p. 14), and writes: ‘An existence which is essentially
evolutionary is itself the justification for an evolution towards a more
comprehensive existence 1 (p. 17). I do not think Dr. Waddington is him-
self at ease in this view, for he does endeavour to recommend the course
of evolution to us on three grounds other than its mere occurrence, (a)
That the later stages include or ‘comprehend’ the earlier. ( b ) That T. H.
Huxley’s picture of Evolution will not revolt you if you regard it from
an ‘actuarial’ point of view. ( c ) That, any way, after all, it isn’t half so
bad as people make out (‘not so morally offensive that we cannot accept
it,’ p. 18). These three palliatives are more creditable to Dr. Waddington’s
heart than his head and seem to me to give up the main position. If Evolu-
tion is praised (or, at least, apologized for) on the ground of any properties
it exhibits, then we are using an external standard and the attempt to make
existence its own justification has been abandoned. If that attempt is main-
tained, why does Dr. Waddington concentrate on Evolution: i.e. on a
temporary phase of organic existence in one planet? This is ‘geocentric.’
If Good = “whatever Nature happens to be doing,” then surely we
should notice what Nature is doing as a whole; and nature as a whole, I
understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinc-
tion of all life in every part of the universe, so that Dr. Waddington’s
ethics, stripped of their unaccountable bias towards such a parochial affair
as tellurian biology, would leave murder and suicide our only duties.
Even this, I confess, seems to me a lesser objection than the discrepancy
between Dr. Waddington’s first principle and the value judgements men
actually make. To value anything simply because it occurs is in fact to

THE WAY 2J

Finally, it is worth inquiry whether there is any instinct to
care for posterity or preserve the species. I do not discover it
in myself: and yet I am a man rather prone to t hink of remote
futurity— a man who can read Mr. Olaf Stapledon with de-
light. Much less do I find it easy to believe that the majority
of people who have sat opposite me in buses or stood with me
in queues feel an unreflective impulse to do anything at all
about the species, or posterity. Only people educated in a
particular way have ever had the idea ‘posterity’ before their
minds at all. It is difficult to assign to instinct our attitude
towards an object which exists only for reflective men. What
we have by nature is an impulse to preserve our own children
and grandchildren; an impulse which grows progressively
feebler as the imagination looks forward and finally dies out
in the ‘deserts of vast futurity.’ No parents who were guided
by this instinct would dream for a moment of setting up the
claims of their hypothetical descendants against those of the
baby actually crowing and kicking in the room. Those of us
who accept the Tao may, perhaps, say that they ought to do
so: but that is not open to those who treat instinct as the
source of value. As we pass from mother love to rational
planning for the future we are passing away from the realm of
instinct into that of choice and reflection: and if instinct is the
source of value, planning for the future ought to be less re-
spectable and less obligatory than the baby language and
cuddling of the fondest mother or the most fatuous nursery
anecdotes of a doting father. If we are to base ourselves upon

worship success, like Quislings or men of Vichy. Other philosophies more
wicked have been devised: none more vulgar. I am far from suggesting
that Dr. Waddington practises in real life such grovelling prostration be-
fore the fait accompli. Let us hope that Rasselas, cap. 22, gives the right
picture of what his philosophy amounts to in action. (‘The philosopher
rose up and departed with the air of a man that had co-operated with the
present system.’)

26 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

instinct, these things are the substance and care for posterity
the shadow — the huge, flickering shadow of the nursery
happiness cast upon the screen of the unknown future. I do
not say this projection is a bad thing: but then I do not believe
that instinct is the ground of value judgements. What is
absurd is to claim that your care for posterity finds its justifi-
cation in instinct and then flout at every turn the only instinct
on which it could be supposed to rest, tearing the child almost
from the breast to creche and kindergarten in the interests
of progress and the coming race.

The truth finally becomes apparent that neither in any op-
eration with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct
can the Innovator find the basis for a system of values. None
of the principles he requires are to be found there: but they
are all to be found somewhere else. ‘AH within the four seas
are his brothers’ (xii. 5) says Confucius of the Chun-tzu, the
cuor gentil or gentleman. Humani nihil a me alienum puto
says the Stoic. ‘Do as you would be done by’ says Jesus.
‘Humanity is to be preserved’ says Locke. 4 AH the practical
principles behind the Innovator’s case for posterity, or
society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the
Tao. But they are nowhere else. Unless you accept these
without question as being to the world of action what axioms
are to the world of theory, you can have no practical prin-
ciples whatever. You cannot reach them as conclusions: they
are premisses. You may, since they can give no ‘reason’ for
themselves of a kind to sflence Gaius and Titius, regard them
as sentiments: but then you must give up contrasting ‘real’ or
‘rational’ value with sentimental value. AH value wiU be
sentimental; and you must confess (on pain of abandoning
every value) that aU sentiment is not ‘merely’ subjective. You
may, on the other hand, regard them as rational — nay as
4 See Appendix.

THE WAY 27

rationality itself — as things so obviously reasonable that they
neither demand nor admit proof. But then you must allow
that Reason can be practical, that an ought must not be dis-
missed because it cannot produce some is as its credential. If
nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if
nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory
at all.

To some it will appear that I have merely restored under
another name what they always meant by basic or funda-
mental instinct. But much more than a choice of words is
involved. The Innovator attacks traditional values (the T ao)
in defence of what he at first supposes to be (in some special
sense) ‘rational or ‘biological’ values. But as we have seen,
all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao, and even
claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from
the Tao. If he had really started from scratch, from right out-
side the human tradition of value, no jugglery could have
advanced him an inch towards the conception that a man
should die for the community or work for posterity. If the
Tao falls, all his own conceptions of value fall with it. Not
one of them can claim any authority other than that of the
T ao. Only by such shreds of the Tao as he has inherited is he
enabled even to attack it. The question therefore arises what
title he has to select bits of it for acceptance and to reject
others. For if the bits he rejects have no authority, neither
have those he retains: if what he retains is valid, what he re-
jects is equally valid too.

The Innovator, for example, rates high the claims of pos-
terity. He cannot get any valid claim for posterity out of
instinct or (in the modem sense) reason. He is really deriving
our duty to posterity from the Tao; our duty to do good to
all men is an axiom of Practical Reason, and our duty to do
good to our descendants is a dear deduction from it. But then,

28 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

in every form of the Tao which has come down to us, side by
side with the duty to children and descendants lies the duty
to parents and ancestors. By what right do we reject one and
accept the other? Again, the Innovator may place economic
value first. To get people fed and clothed is the great end,
and in pursuit of it scruples about justice and good faith may
be set aside. The Tao of course agrees with him about the
importance of getting the people fed and clothed. Unless the
Innovator were himself using the T ao he could never have
learned of such a duty. But side by side with it in the Tao lie
those duties of justice and good faith which he is ready to
debunk. What is his warrant? He may be a Jingoist, a Racial-
ist, an extreme nationalist, who maintains that the advance-
ment of his own people is the object to which all else ought
to yield. But no land of factual observation and no appeal to
instinct will give him a ground for this opinion. Once more,
he is in fact deriving it from the Tao: a duty to our own kin,
because they are our own kin, is a part of traditional morality.
But side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it, lie the in-
flexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the long run,
all men are our brothers. Whence comes the Innovator’s au-
thority to pick and choose?

Since I can see no answer to these questions, I draw the
following conclusions. This thing which I have called for
convenience the T ao, and which others may call Natural Law
or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical
Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of
possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value
judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value
is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a
new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There
never has been, and never will be, a radically new judgement
of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new

THE WAY 29

systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies,’ all consist of
fragments from the T an itself, arbitrarily wrenched from
their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in
their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such
validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a super-
stition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a super-
stition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the
pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is con-
jugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao
is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels
could succeed they would find that they had destroyed them-
selves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a
new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, in-
deed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

Does this mean, then, that no progress in our perceptions
of value can ever take place? That we are bound down for
ever to an unchanging code given once for all? And is it, in
any event, possible to talk of obeying what I call the Tao? If
we lump together, as I have done, the traditional moralities of
East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew, shall
we not find many contradictions and some absurdities? I
admit all this. Some criticism, some removal of contradictions,
even some real development, is required. But there are two
very different kinds of criticism.

A theorist about language may approach his native tongue,
as it were from outside, regarding its genius as a thing that
has no claim on him and advocating wholesale alterations of
its idiom and spelling in the interests of commercial conveni-
ence or scientific accuracy. That is one thing. A great poet,
who has ‘loved, and been well nurtured in, his mother tongue,’
may also make great alterations in it, but his changes of the
language are made in the spirit of the language itself: he works
from within. The language which suffers, has also inspired.

30 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

the changes. That is a different thing — as different as the
works of Shakespeare are from Basic English. It is the dif-
ference between alteration from within and alteration from
without: between the organic and the surgical.

In the same way, the T ao admits development from within.
There is a difference between a real moral advance and a
mere innovation. From the Confucian ‘Do not do to others
what you would not like them to do to you’ to the Christian
‘Do as you would be done by’ is a real advance. The morality
of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. The first is an advance be-
cause no one who did not admit the validity of the old maxim
could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who
accepted the old would at once recognize the new as an ex-
tension of the same principle. If he rejected it, he would have
to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as
something simply heterogeneous from his own ideas of value.
But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are
ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to
put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for
any value judgements at all. It is the difference between a man
who says to us: ‘You like your vegetables moderately fresh;
why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh? ’ and
a man who says, ‘Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks
and centipedes instead.’

Those who understand the spirit of the Tao and who have
been led by that spirit can modify ft in directions which that
spirit itself demands. Only they can know what those direc-
tions are. The outsider knows nothing about the matter. His
attempts at alteration, as we have seen, contradict themselves.
So far from being able to harmonize discrepancies in its letter
by penetration to its spirit, he merely snatches at some one
precept, on which the accidents of time and place happen to
have riveted his attention, and then rides it to death — for no

THE WAY

3i

reason that he can give. From within the Tao itself comes
the only authority to modify the Tao. This is what Confucius
meant when he said ‘With those who follow a different Way
it is useless to take counsel.’ 5 This is why Aristotle said that
only those who have been well brought up can usefully study
ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the
Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible . 6 He
may be hostile, but he cannot be critical: he does not know
what is being discussed. This is why it was also said ‘This
people that knoweth not the Law is accursed’ 7 and ‘He that
believeth not shall be damned .’ 8 An open mind, in questions
that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the
ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical
Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let
his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose.
Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the
T ao or anything else.

In particular instances it may, no doubt, be a matter of
some delicacy to decide where the legitimate internal criti-
cism ends and the fatal external kind begins. But wherever
any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to
produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on
it, we have taken the wrong position. The legitimate re-
former endeavours to show that the precept in question con-
flicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more
fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgement
of value it professes to embody. The direct frontal attack
‘Why? ’ — ‘What good does it do? ’ — ‘Who said so? ’ is never
permissible; not because it is harsh or offensive but because

5 Analects of Confucius, xv. 39,

6 ,Eth. Nic . 1095 b , 1140 b , 11 51 a .

7 John vii. 49. The speaker said it in malice, but with more truth than
he meant. Cf. John xi. 51.

8 Mark xvi. 16.

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

3 *

no values at all can justify themselves on that level. If you
persist in that kind of trial you will destroy all values, and so
destroy the bases of your own criticism as well as the thing
criticized. You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao.
Nor must we postpone obedience to a precept until its cre-
dentials have been examined. Only those who are practising
the Tao will understand it. It is the well-nurtured man, the
cuor gentil, and he alone, who can recognize Reason when it
comes . 9 It is Paul, the Pharisee, the man ‘perfect as touching
the Law’ who learns where and how that Law was deficient . 10

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I may add that though
I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here
attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply
arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the
ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute
validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about
these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly
more ‘realistic’ basis, is doomed. Whether this position im-
plies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not
here concerned with.

Yet how can the modem mind be expected to embrace the
conclusion we have reached? This Tao which, it seems, we
must treat as an absolute is simply a phenomenon like any
other — the reflection upon the minds of our ancestors of the
agricultural rhythm in which they lived or even of their phys-
iology. We know already in principle how such things are
produced: soon we shall know in detail: eventually we shall
be able to produce them at will. Of course, while we did not
know how minds were made, we accepted this mental furni-
ture as a datum, even as a master. But many things in nature
which were once our masters have become our servants. Why
not this? Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in
9 Republic, 402 A. 10 Phil. iii. < 5 .

THE WAY

33

stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of ‘na-
ture’ which has hitherto been called the conscience of man?
You threaten us with some obscure disaster if we step out-
side it: but we have been threatened in that way by ob-
scurantists at every step in our advance, and each time the
threat has proved false. You say we shall have no values at
all if we step outside the Tao . Very well: we shall probably
find that we can get on quite comfortably without them.
Let us regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as an
interesting psychological survival: let us step right out of
all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for our-
selves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any
ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be
such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master
ourselves and choose our own destiny.

This is a very possible position: and those who hold it can-
not be accused of self-contradiction like the half-hearted
sceptics who still hope to find ‘real’ values when they have
debunked the traditional ones. This is the rejection of the
concept of value altogether. I shall need another lecture to
consider it.

Ill

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however
he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me
for a slave.

Bunyan

‘Man’s conquest of Nature’ is an expression often used to
describe the progress of applied science. ‘Man has Nature
whacked’ said someone to a friend of mine not long ago. In
their context the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the
speaker was dying of tuberculosis. ‘No matter,’ he said, ‘I
know Fm one of the casualties. Of course there are casualties
on the winning as well as on the losing side. But that doesn’t
alter the fact that it is winning.’ I have chosen this story as my
point of departure in order to make it clear that I do not wish
to disparage all that is really beneficial in the process described
as ‘Man’s conquest,’ much less all the real devotion and self-
sacrifice that has gone to make it possible. But having done so
I must proceed to analyse this conception a little more closely.
In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over
Nature?

Let us consider three typical examples: the aeroplane, the
wireless, and the contraceptive. In a civilized community, in
peace-time, anyone who can pay for them may use these
things But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is

34

THE ABOLITION OF MAN 35

exercising his own proper or individual power over Nature.
If I pay you to carry me, I am not therefore myself a strong
man. Any or all of the three things I have mentioned can be
withheld from some men by other men — by those who sell,
or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of
production, or those who make the goods. What we call
Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men
which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.
Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or
the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the
possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propa-
ganda. And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical,
negative sense in which all possible future generations are the
patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already
alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence;
by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they
are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one
generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From
this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature
turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other
men with Nature as its instrument.

It is, of course, a commonplace to complain that men have
hitherto used badly, and against their fellows, the powers
that science has given them. But that is not the point I am try-
ing to make. I am not speaking of particular corruptions and
abuses which an increase of moral virtue would cure: I am
considering what the thing called ‘Man’s power over Nature’
must always and essentially be. No doubt, the picture could
be modified by public ownership of raw materials and facto-
ries and public control of scientific research. But unless we
have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation
over others. And even within the world state or the nation it
will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minori-

36 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

ties, and (in the concrete) of a government over the people.
And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding,
must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones.

The latter point is not always sufficiently emphasized, be-
cause those who write on social matters have not yet learned
to imitate the physicists by always including Time among the
dimensions. In order to understand fully what Man’s power
over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other
men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time
from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each
generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so
far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels
against tradition, resists and limits the power of its prede-
cessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted
of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progres-
sive control of natural processes resulting in a continual in-
crease of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age
really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power
to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after
it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not
stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines
in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.
And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained
maximum power over posterity were also the age most
emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing
the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of
its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart
from this, the later a generation comes — the nearer it lives to
that date at which the species becomes extinct — the less
power it will have in the forward direction, because its sub-
jects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power
vested in the race as a whole steadily grooving as long as the
race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power,

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

37

will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great
planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least
power upon the future. The real picture is that -of one
dominant age — let us suppose the hundredth century a.d. —
which resists all previous ages most successfully and domi-
nates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real
master of the human species. But even within this master
generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species)
the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s
conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners
are realized, means the rule of- a few hundreds of men over
billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any
simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won
by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves
him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides
being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who
follows the triumphal car.

I am not yet considering whether the total result of such
ambivalent victories is a good thing or a bad. I am only mak-
ing clear what Man’s conquest of Nature really means and
especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is
not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by
pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda
based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full con-
trol over himself. Human nature will be the last part of
Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We
shall have ‘taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’
and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish
it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely,
will have won it?

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases
means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make
other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture anc

38 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this
power. But the situation to which we must look forward will
be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be
enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists
have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed,
when we read them — how Plato would have every infant ‘a
bastard nursed in a bureau,’ and Elyot would have the boy see
no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women , 1
and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no
turn for poetry 2 — we may well thank the beneficent obsti-
nacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children
for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still pos-
sesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed
with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible
scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners
who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.
The second difference is even more important. In the older
systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce
and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the
Tao — a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject
and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did
not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed
on what they had received: they initiated the young neo-
phyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him
and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to

1 The Boke Named the Govemour , i. iv: *A 1 men except physitions
only shulde be excluded and kepte out of the norisery/ i. vi: ‘After that
a childe is come to seuen yeres of age ... the most sure counsaile is to
withdrawe him from all company of women/

2 Some Thoughts concerning Education , § 7: ‘I will also advise his Feet
to be wash'd every Day in cold Water, and to have his Shoes so thin that
they might leak and let in Water , whenever he comes near it/ § 174; ‘If he
have a poetick vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the World that the
Father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks
the Parents should labour to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may
be/ Yet Locke is one of our most sensible writers on education.

THE ABOLITION OF MAN 39

fly- This will be changed. Values are now mere natural
phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the-
pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever T ao there is will
be the product, not the motive, of education. The con-
ditioners have been emancipated from all that. It is one more
part of Nature which they have conquered. The ultimate
springs of human action are no longer, for them, something
given. They have surrendered — like electricity: it is the func-
tion of the Conditioners to control, not to obey them. They
know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of
conscience they will produce. They themselves are outside,
above. For we are assuming the last stage of Man’s struggle
with Nature. The final victory has been won. Human nature
has been conquered — and, of course, has conquered, in what-
ever sense those words may now bear.

The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of arti-
ficial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in
the Human race. They are the motivators, the creators of
motives. But how are they going to be motivated themselves?
For a time, perhaps, by survivals, within their own minds, of
the old ‘natural’ Tao. Thus at first they may look upon them-
selves as servants and guardians of humanity and conceive
that they have a ‘duty’ to do it ‘good.’ But it is only by confu-
sion that they can remain in this state. They recognize the
concept of duty as the result of certain processes which they
can now control. Their victory has consisted precisely in
emerging from the state in which they were acted upon by
those processes to the state in which they use them as tools.
One of the things they now have to decide is whether they
will, or will not, so condition the rest of us that we can go on
having the old idea of duty and the old reactions to it. How
can duty help them to decide that? Duty itself is up for trial:
it cannot also be the judge. And ‘good’ fares no better. They

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

40

know quite well how to produce a dozen different concep-
tions of good in us. The question is which, if any, they should
produce. No conception of good can help them to decide. It
is absurd to fix on one of the things they are comparing and
make it the standard of comparison.

To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious
difficulty for my Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded,
critics may ask ‘Why should you suppose they will be such
bad men?’ But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They
are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you
like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional
humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding
what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean. ‘Good’ and ‘bad,’
applied to them, are words without content: for it is from
them that the content of these words is henceforward to be
derived. Nor is their difficulty factitious. We might suppose
that it was possible to say ‘After all, most of us want more or
less the same things — food and drink and sexual intercourse,
amusement, art, science, and the longest possible life for in-
dividuals and for the species. Let them simply say, This is
what we happen to like, and go on to condition men in the
way most likely to produce it. Where’s the trouble?’ But
this will not answer. In the first place, it is false that we all
really like the same things. But even if we did, what motive
is to impel the Conditioners to scorn delights and live labori-
ous days in order that we, and posterity, may have what we
like? Their duty? But that is only the Tao, which they may
decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them.
If they accept it, then they are no longer the makers of con-
science but still its subjects, and their final conquest over
Nature has not really happened. The preservation of the
species? But why should the species be preserved? One of
the questions before them is whether this feeling for posterity

THE ABOLITION OF MAN 41

(they know well how it is produced) shall be continued or
not. However far they go back, or down, they can find no
ground to stand on. Every motive they try to act on becomes
at once a petitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are
not men at all. Stepping outside the T ao, they have stepped
into the void. Nor are their subj ects necessarily unhappy men.
They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final con-
quest has proved to be the abolition of Man.

Yet the Conditioners will act. When I said just now that
all motives fail them, I should have said all motives except
one. All motives that claim any validity other than that of
their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed
them. Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo has been ex-
plained away. But what never claimed objectivity cannot be
destroyed by subjectivism. The impulse to scratch when I
itch or to pull to pieces when I am inquisitive is immune from
the solvent which is fatal to my justice, or honour, or care for
posterity. When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked,
what says ‘I want’ remains. It cannot be exploded or ‘seen
through’ because it never had any pretensions. The Condi-
tioners, therefore, must come to, be motivated simply by
their own pleasure. I am not here speaking of the corrupting
influence of power nor expressing the fear that under it our
Conditioners will degenerate. The very words corrupt and
degenerate imply a doctrine of value and are therefore mean-
ingless in this context. My point is that those who stand out-
side all judgements of value cannot have any ground for pre-
ferring one of their own impulses to another except the
emotional strength of that impulse. We may legitimately
hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus
emptied of all ‘rational’ or ‘spiritual’ motives, some will be
benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benev-
olent impulses, stripped of that preference and encourage-

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

42

ment which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their
merely natural strength and frequency as psychological
events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether
history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped
outside traditional morality and attained power, has used
that power benevolently. I am inclined to think that the
Conditioners will hate the conditioned. Though regarding as
an illusion the artificial conscience which they produce in us
their subjects, they will yet perceive that it creates in us an il-
lusion of meaning for our lives which compares favourably
with the futility of their own: and they will envy us as eu-
nuchs envy men. But I do not insist on this, for it is mere con-
jecture. What is not conjecture is that our hope even of a
‘conditioned’ happiness rests on what is ordinarily called
‘chance’ — the chance that benevolent impulses may on the
whole predominate in our Conditioners. For without the
judgement ‘Benevolence is good’ — that is, without re-enter-
ing the Tao — they can have no ground for promoting or
stabilizing their benevolent impulses rather than any others.
By the logic of their position they must just take their im-
pulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means
Nature. It is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the
association of ideas, that the motives of the Conditioners will
spring. Their extreme rationalism, by ‘seeing through’ all
‘rational’ motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational
behaviour. If you will not obey the T ao, or else commit sui-
cide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to
mere ‘nature’) is the only course left open.

At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we
find the whole human race subjected to some individual men,
and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which
is purely ‘natural’ — to their irrational impulses. Nature, un-
trammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through

THE ABOLITION OF MAN 43

them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in
the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest
of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by
step, to this conclusion. All Nature’s apparent reverses have
been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating
her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like
hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to
enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world
(with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into
existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive
species that rose in revolt against her so many milli ons of
years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and
mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferurn victor em cepit: and
if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second
revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Con-
ditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows
cold.

My point may be clearer to some if it is put in a different
form. Nature is a word of varying meanings, which can best
be understood if we consider its various opposites. The Nat-
ural is the opposite of the Artificial, the Civil, the Human,
the Spiritual, and the Supernatural. The Artificial does not
now concern us. If we take the rest of the list of opposites,
however, I think we can get a rough idea of what men have
meant by Nature and what it is they oppose to her. Nature
seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is
less fully so or not so at all. She seems to be the world of
quantity, as against the world of quality: of objects as against
consciousness: of the bound, as against the wholly or partially
autonomous: of that which knows no values as against that
which both has and perceives value: of efficient causes (or,
in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against
final causes. Now I take it that when we understand a thing

44 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

analytically and then dominate and use it for our own con-
venience we reduce it to the level of ‘Nature’ in the sense
that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its
final cause (if any) , and treat it in terms of quantity. This
repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total
reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful:
something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead
man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These objects resist
the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the
world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar
price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipu-
lative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not
look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we
cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt
the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser
may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The
stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the
Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many,
no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that
the real world is different from what we expected, and the old
opposition to Galileo or to ‘bodysnatchers’ is simply ob-
scurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the great-
est of modem scientists who feel most sure that the object,
stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere
quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific
followers of science, may think so. The great minds know
very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstrac-
tion, that something of its reality has been lost.

From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in
a new fight. We reduce things to mere Nature in order thut
we may ‘conquer’ them. We are always conquering Nature,
because ‘Nature’ is the name for what we have, to some ex-
tent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as

THE ABOLITION OF MAN 4S

mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her
domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh
and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we
can psycho-analyse her. The wresting of powers -from Nature
is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as tins
process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that
the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final
step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature,
the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who
stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one
and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry
a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces ab-
surdity. It is like the famous Irishman who found that a cer-
tain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence con-
cluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to
warm his house with no fuel at all. It is the magician’s bargain:
give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that

is, our selves, have been given up, the power thus conferred
will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and pup-
pets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s
power to treat himself as a mere ‘natural object’ and his own
judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipu-
lation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not
lie in the fact that this point of view (like one’s first day in a
dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to

it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symp-
tom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself
as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to
be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by
mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-
humanized Conditioners.

We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways: to
lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to

46 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

retain it. It is impossible. Either we are rational spirit obliged
for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are
mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the
pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive
but their own ‘natural’ impulses. Only the T no provides a
common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and
ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary
to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedi-
ence which is not slavery.

I am not here thinking solely, perhaps not even chiefly, of
those who are our public enemies at the moment. The process
which, if not checked, will abolish Man, goes on apace among
Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The
methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-
eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many
an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run
just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional
values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into
some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be
an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky
generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we
can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treat-
ment of mankind as mere specimens, preparations, begins
to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we
liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration
and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a
commission are ‘potential officer material.’ Most wonderful
of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of
ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.

The true significance of what is going on has been con-
cealed by the use of the abstraction Man. Not that the word
Man is necessarily a pure abstraction. In the T ao itself, as long
as we remain within it, we find the concrete reality in which

THE ABOLITION OF MAN 47

to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and
common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree,
and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beau-
ties and dignities of application. While we speak from within
the Tao we can speak of Man having power over himself in
a sense truly analogous to an individual’s self-control. But
the moment we step outside and regard the Tao as a mere sub-
jective product, this possibility has disappeared. What is now
common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F.,
and Man’s conquest of himself means simply the rule of the
Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world
of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknow-
ingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to
produce.

Nothing I can say will prevent some people from describ-
ing this lecture as an attack on science. I deny the charge, of
course: and real Natural Philosophers (there are some now
alive) will perceive that in defending value I defend inter alia
the value of knowledge, which must die like every other
when its roots in the Tao are cut. But I can go further than
that. I even suggest that from Science herself the cure might
come. I have described as a ‘magician’s bargain’ that process
whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally him-
self, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said.
The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician
failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular
thought that the real story of the birth of Science is mis-
understood. You will even find people who write about the
sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and
Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those
who have studied the period know better. There was very
little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

48

endeavour and the serious scientific endeavo.ur are twins: one
was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they
were twins. They were bom of the same impulse. I allow
that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were
actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the
temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of
which I speak. There is something which unites magic and
applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of
earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem
had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution
had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic
and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality
to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in
the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto
regarded as disgusting and impious — such as digging up and
mutilating the dead. If we compare the chief trumpeter of
the new era (Bacon) with Marlowe’s Faustus, the similarity
is striking. You will read in some critics that Faustus has a
thirst for knowledge. In reality, he hardly mentions it. It is
not truth he wants from his devils, but gold and guns and girls.
‘All things that move between the quiet poles shall be at his
command’ and ‘a sound magician is a mighty god.’ 3 In the
same spirit Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as
an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure
what ought to be a spouse for fruit . 4 The true object is to ex-
tend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible.
He rejects magic because it does not work , 5 but his goal is
that of the magician. In Paracelsus the characters of magician
and scientist are combined. No doubt those who really
founded modem science were usually those whose love of

8 Dr. Faustus , 77-90.

* Advancement of Learning , Bk. I (p. 60 in Ellis and Spedding, 1905;
p. 35 in Everyman Edn.) .

8 Filum Labyrinthij i.

THE ABOLITION OF MAN 49

truth exceeded their love of power; in every mixed move-
ment the efficacy comes from the good elements not from the
bad. But the presence of the bad elements is not irrelevant to
the direction the efficacy takes. It might be going too far to
say that the modern scientific movement was tain ted from its
birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in
an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour.
Its triumphs may have been too rapid and purchased at too
high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance,
may be required.

Is it, then, possible to imagine a new Natural Philosophy,
continually conscious that the ‘natural object’ produced by
analysis and abstraction is not reality but only a view, and
always correcting the abstraction? I hardly know what I am
asking for. I hear rumours that Goethe’s approach to nature
deserves fuller consideration — that even Dr. Steiner may
have seen something that orthodox researchers have missed.
The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do
even to minerals and vegetables what modem science threat-
ens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not ex-
plain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the
whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin
Buber calls the Thow-situation. The analogy between the
T no of Man and the instincts of an animal species would mean
for it new light cast on the unknown thing. Instinct, by the
inly known reality of conscience ^nd not a reduction of con-
science to the category of Instinct. Its followers would not be
free with the words only and merely. In a word, it would
conquer Nature without being at the same time conquered by
her and buy knowledge at a lower cost than that of life.

Perhaps I am asking impossibilities. Perhaps, in the nature
of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk
which kills what it sees and only sees by killing. But if the

5 o THE ABOLITION OF MAN

scientists themselves cannot arrest this process before it
reaches the common Reason and kills that too, then someone
else must arrest it. What I most fear is the reply that I am
‘only one more’ obscurantist, that this barrier, like all pre-
vious barriers set up against the advance of science, can be
safely passed. Such a reply springs from the fatal serialism of
the modem imagination — the image of infinite unilinear pro-
gression which so haunts our minds. Because we have to use
numbers so much we tend to think of every process as if it
must be like the numeral series, where every step, to all
eternity, is the same kind of step as the one before. I implore
you to remember the Irishman and his two stoves. There are
progressions in which the last step is sui generis — incommen-
surable with the others — and in which to go the whole way
is to undo all the labour of your previous journey. To reduce
the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to
that point, the kind of explanation which explains things
away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you
cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that
you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go
on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing
through something is to see something through it. It is good
that the window should be transparent, because the street or
garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the
garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles.
If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.
But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see
through’ all things is the same as not to see.

APPENDIX

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TAO

The following illustrations of the Natural Law are collected
from such sources as come readily to the hand of one who is
not a professional historian. The list niakes no pretence of com-
pleteness. It will be noticed that writers such as Locke and
Hooker, who wrote within the Christian tradition, are quoted
side by side with the New Testament. This would, of course,
be absurd if I were trying to collect independent testimonies to
the Tao . But (i) I am not trying to prove its validity by the
argument from common consent. Its validity cannot be deduced.
For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal
consent could not prove it. (2) The idea of collecting inde-
pendent testimonies presupposes that ‘civilizations’ have arisen
in the world independently of one another; or even that hu-
manity has had several independent emergences on this planet.
The biology and anthropology involved in such an assumption
are extremely doubtful. It is by no means certain that there has
ever (in the sense required) been more than one civilization in
all history. It is at least arguable that every civilization we find
has been derived from another civilization and, in the last resort,
from a single centre — ‘carried’ like an infectious disease or like
the Apostolical succession.

I. The Law of General Beneficence

(a) Negative

‘I have not slain men. I. * * * 5 (Ancient Egyptian. From the Confes-

sion of the Righteous Soul, ‘Book of the Dead. 5 v. Encyclopedia
of Religion and Ethics [ =ERE ], vol. v, p. 478.)

51

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

5 *

'Do not murder.’ (Ancient Jewish. Exodus xx. 13.)

‘Terrify not men or God will terrify thee.’ (Ancient Egyp-
tian. Precepts of Ptahhetep. H. R. Hall, Ancient History of Near
East, p. 133 n.)

‘In Nastrond (= Hell) I saw . . . murderers.’ (Old Norse.
Volospd 38, 39.)

‘I have not brought misery upon my fellows. I have not made
the beginning of every day laborious in the sight of him who
worked for me.’ (Ancient Egyptian. Confession of Righteous
Soul. ERE v. 478.)

‘I have not been grasping.’ (Ancient Egyptian. Ibid.)

‘Who meditates oppression, his dwelling is overturned.’ (Bab-
ylonian. Hymn to Samas. ERE v. 445.)

‘He who is cruel and calumnious has the character of a cat.’
(Hindu. Laws of Manu. Janet, Histoire de la Science Politique,
vol. i, p. 6.)

‘Slander not.’ (Babylonian. Hymn to Sama. ERE v. 445.)

‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.’
(Ancient Jewish. Exodus xx. 16.)

‘Utter not a word by which anyone could be wounded.’
(Hindu. Janet, p. 7.)

‘Has he . . . driven an honest man from his family? broken
up a well cemented clan?’ (Babylonian. List of Sins from in-
cantation tablets. ERE v. 446.)

‘I have not caused hunger. I have not caused weeping.’ (An-
cient Egyptian. ERE v. 478.)

‘Never do to others what you would not like them to do to
you.’ (Ancient Chinese. Analects of Confucius, trans. A. Waley,
xv. 23; cf. xii. 2.)

‘Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart.’ (Ancient Jew-
ish. Leviticus xix. 17.)

‘He whose heart is in the smallest degree set upon goodness
will dislike no one.’ (Ancient Chinese. Analects, iv. 4.)

(b) Positive

‘Nature urges that a man should wish human society to exist
and should wish to enter it.’ (Roman. Cicero, De Officiis, 1. iv.)

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TAO 53

‘By the fundamental Law of Nature Man [is] to be preserved
as much as possible/ (Locke, Treatises of Civil Govt . ii. 3*)

‘When the people have multiplied, what next should be done
for them? The Master said, Enrich them. Jan Ch’iu said, When
one has enriched them, what next should be done for them?
The Master said, Instruct them.’ (Ancient Chinese. Analects ,
xiii. 9.)

‘Speak kindness . . . show good will/ (Babylonian. Hymn to
SamaL ERE v. 445.)

‘Men were brought into existence for the sake of men that
they might do one another good/ (Roman. Cicero, De Off .
1. vii.)

‘Man is man’s delight/ (Old Norse. Havamdl 47.)

‘He who is asked for alms should always give/ (Hindu. Janet,
i. 7.)

‘What good man regards any misfortune as no concern of
his?’ (Roman. Juvenal xv. 140.)

‘I am a man: nothing human is alien to me/ (Roman. Terence,
Heaut . Tim.)

‘Love thy neighbour as thyself/ (Ancient Jewish. Leviticus
xix. 18.)

‘Love the stranger as thyself/ (Ancient Jewish. Ibid. 33, 34.)

‘Do to men what you wish men to do to you/ (Christian.
Matt. vii. 12.)

II. The Law of Special Beneficence

‘It is upon the trunk that a gentleman works. When that is
firmly set up, the Way grows. And surely proper behaviour to
parents and elder brothers is the trunk of goodness/ (Ancient
Chinese. Analects , i. 2.)

‘Brothers shall fight and be each others’ bane/ (Old Norse.
Account of the Evil Age before the World’s end, Volospa 45.)

‘Has he insulted his elder sister?’ (Babylonian. List of Sins.
ERE v. 446.)

‘You will see them take care of their kindred [and] the chil-

54 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

dren of their friends . . . never reproaching them in the least.’
(Redskin. Le Jeune, quoted ERE v. 437.)

‘Love thy wife studiously. Gladden her heart all thy life long.’
(Ancient Egyptian. ERE v. 481.)

‘Nothing can ever change the claims of kinship for a right
thinking man.’ (Anglo-Saxon. Beowulf, 2600.)

‘Did not Socrates love his own children, though he did so as
a free man and as one not forgetting that the gods have the first
claim on our friendship?’ (Greek. Epictetus, iii. 24.)

‘Natural affection is a thing right and according to Nature.’
(Greek. Ibid. 1. xi.)

‘I ought not to be unfeeling like a statue but should fulfil both
my natural and artificial relations, as a worshipper, a son, a
brother, a father, and a citizen.’ (Greek, Ibid. iii. ii.)

‘This first I rede thee: be blameless to thy kindred. Take no
vengeance even though they do thee wrong.’ (Old Norse.
Sigrdrifumdl, 22.)

‘Is it only the sons of Atreus who love their wives? For every
good man, who is right-minded, loves and cherishes his own.’
(Greek. Homer, Iliad, ix. 340.)

‘The union and fellowship of men will be best preserved if
each receives from us the more kindness in proportion as he is
more closely connected with us.’ (Roman. Cicero, De Off . 1.
xvi.)

‘Part of us is claimed by our country, part by our parents,
part by our friends.’ (Roman. Ibid. 1. vii.)

‘If a ruler . . . compassed the salvation of the whole state,
surely you would call him Good? The Master said, It would no
longer be a matter of “Good.” He would without doubt be a
Divine Sage.’ (Ancient Chinese. Analects, vi. 28.)

‘Has it escaped you that, in the eyes of gods and good men,
your native land deserves from you more honour, worship, and
reverence than your mother and father and all your ancestors?
That you should give a softer answer to its anger than to a fa-
ther’s anger? That if you cannot persuade it to alter its mind you
must obey it in all quietness, whether it binds you or beats you

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TAO 55

or sends you to a war where you may get wounds or death?’
(Greek. Plato, Crito y 51 a, b.)

‘If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his
own house, he hath denied the faith.’ (Christian. I Tim. v. 8.)

Tut them in mind to obey magistrates.’ ... ‘I exhort that
prayers be made for kings and all that are in authority.’ (Chris-
tian. Tit. iii. 1 and I Tim. ii. 1,2.)

III. Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors

Tour father is an image of the Lord of Creation, your mother
an image of the Earth. For him who fails to honour them, every
work of piety is in vain. This is the first duty.’ (Hindu. Janet,
1

‘Has he despised Father and Mother?’ (Babylonian. List of
Sins. ERE v. 446.)

‘I was a staff by my Father’s side. ... I went in and out at
his command.’ (Ancient Egyptian. Confession of the Righteous
Soul. ERE v. 481.)

‘Honour thy Father and thy Mother.’ (Ancient Jewish. Exo-
dus xx. 12.)

‘To care for parents.’ (Greek. List of duties in Epictetus, in.
vii.)

‘Children, old men, the poor, and the sick, should be consid-
ered as the lords of the atmosphere.’ (Hindu. Janet, i. 8.)

‘Rise up before the hoary head and honour the old man.’
(Ancient Jewish. Lev. xix. 32.)

‘I tended the old man, I gave him my staff.’ (Ancient Egyp-
tian. ERE v. 481.)

‘You will see them take care ... of old men.’ (Redskin.
Le Jeune, quoted ERE v. 437.)

‘I have not taken away the oblations of the blessed dead.’ (An-
cient Egyptian. Confession of the Righteous Soul. ERE v. 478.)

‘When proper respect towards the dead is shown at the end
and continued after they are far away, the moral force ( te ) of
a people has reached its highest point.’ (Ancient Chinese. Ana-
lects, i. 9.)

56 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

IV. Duties to Children and Posterity
‘Children, the old, the poor, etc. should be considered as lords
of the atmosphere.’ (Hindu. Janet, i. 8.)

‘To marry and to beget children.’ (Greek. List of duties.
Epictetus, hi. vii.)

‘Can you conceive an Epicurean commonwealth? . . . What
will happen? Whence is the population to be kept up? Who will
educate them? Who will be Director of Adolescents? Who
will be Director of Physical Training? What will be taught?’
(Greek. Ibid.)

‘Nature produces a special love of offspring’ and ‘To live ac-
cording to Nature is the supreme good.’ (Roman. Cicero, De
Off. i. iv, and De Legibus, i. xxi.)

‘The second of these achievements is no less glorious than the
first; for while the first did good on one occasion, the second
will continue to benefit the state forever.’ (Roman. Cicero, De
Off . i. xxii.)

‘Great reverence is owed to a child.’ (Roman. Juvenal, xiv.
47 -)

‘The Master said, Respect the young.’ (Ancient Chinese.
Analects , ix. 22.)

‘The killing of the women and more especially of the young
boys and girls who are to go to make up the future strength of
the people, is the saddest part . . . and we feel it very sorely.’
(Redskin. Account of the Battle of Wounded Knee. ERE v.

432-)

V. The Law of Justice
(a) Sexual Justice

‘Has he approached his neighbour’s wife?’ (Babylonian. List
of Sins. EKE v. 44 6.)

‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ (Ancient Jewish. Exodus
xx. 14.)

‘I saw in Nastrond (= Hell) . . . beguilers of others’ wives.’
(Old Norse. Volospd 3 £, 39.)

57

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TAO

( b ) Honesty

‘Has he drawn false boundaries?’ (Babylonian. List of Sins.
ERE v. 44 6.)

‘To wrong, to rob, to cause to be robbed.’ (Babylonian. Ibid.)

‘I have not stolen.’ (Ancient Egyptian. Confession of Right-
eous Soul. ERE v. 478.)

‘Thou shalt not steal.’ (Ancient Jewish. Exodus xx. 15.)

‘Choose loss rather than shameful gains.’ (Greek. Chilon Fr.
10. Diels.)

‘Justice is the settled and permanent intention of rendering
to each man his rights.’ (Roman. Justinian, Institutions , 1. i.)

‘If the native made a “find” of any kind (e.g. a honey tree) and
marked it, it was thereafter safe for him, as far as his own tribes-
men were concerned, no matter how long he left it.’ (Australian
Aborigines. ERE v. 441.)

‘The first point of justice is that none should do any mischief
to another unless he has first been attacked by the other’s wrong-
doing. The second is that a man should treat common property
as common property, and private property as his own. There
is no such thing as private property by nature, but things have
become private either through prior occupation (as when men
of old came into empty territory) or by conquest, or law, or
agreement, or stipulation, or casting lots.’ (Roman. Cicero, De
Off. I. vii.)

(c) Justice in Courts ire.

‘Whoso takes no bribe . . . well pleasing is this to Samas.’
(Babylonian. ERE v. 445.)

‘I have not traduced the slave to him who is set over him.’
(Ancient Egyptian. Confession of Righteous Soul. ERE v. 478.)

‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.’
(Ancient Jewish. Exodus xx. 16.)

‘Regard him whom thou knowest like him whom thou know-
est not.’ (Ancient Egyptian. ERE v. 482.)

‘Do no unrighteousness in judgement. You must not consider
the fact that one party is poor nor the fact that the other is a
great man.’ (Ancient Jewish. Leviticus xix. ij.)

5 8 THE ABOLITION OF MAN

VI. The Law of Good Faith and Veracity

‘A sacrifice is obliterated by a lie and the merit of alms by an
act of fraud.’ (Hindu. Janet, i. 6.)

‘Whose mouth, full of lying, avails not before thee: thou
bumest their utterance.’ (Babylonian. Hymn to Samas. ERE
v. 445.)

‘With his mouth was he full of Yea, in his heart full of Nay?'
(Babylonian. ERE v. 44 6.)

‘I have not spoken falsehood.’ (Ancient Egyptian. Confession
of Righteous Soul. ERE v. 478.)

‘I sought no trickery, nor swore false oaths.’ (Anglo-Saxon.
Beovmlf, 2738.)

‘The Master said, Be of unwavering good faith.’ (Ancient
Chinese. Analects, viii. 13.)

‘In Nastrond (= Hell) I saw the perjurers.’ (Old Norse.
Volospd 39.)

‘Hateful to me as are the gates of Hades is that man who says
one thing, and hides another in his heart.’ (Greek. Homer. Iliad ,
ix. 312.)

‘The foundation of justice is good faith.’ (Roman. Cicero,
De Off . 1. vii.)

‘[The gentleman] must learn to be faithful to his superiors
and to keep promises.’ (Ancient Chinese. Analects, 1. 8.)

‘Anything is better than treachery.’ (Old Norse. Hdvamdl
124.)

VII. The Law of Mercy

‘The poor and the sick should be regarded as lords of the
atmosphere.’ (Hindu. Janet, i. 8.)

‘Whoso makes intercession for the weak, well pleasing is this
to Samas’ (Babylonian. ERE v. 445.)

‘Has he failed to set a prisoner free?’ (Babylonian. List of
Sins. ERE v. 446.)

‘I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes
to the naked, a ferry boat to the boatless.’ (Ancient Egyptian.
ERE v. 478.)

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TAO S9

‘One should never strike a woman; not even with a flower.’
(Hindu. Janet, i. 8.)

‘There, Thor, you got disgrace, when you beat women.’ (Old
Norse. Harbarthsljoth 38.)

‘In the Dalebura tribe a woman, a cripple from birth, was car-
ried about by the tribes-people in turn until her death at the age
of sixty-six.’ . . . ‘They never desert the sick.’ (Australian Ab-
origines. ERE v. 443.)

‘You will see them take care of . . . widows, orphans, and old
men, never reproaching them.’ (Redskin. ERE v. 439.)

‘Nature confesses that she has given to the human race the
tenderest hearts, by giving us the power to weep. This is the
best part of us.’ (Roman. Juvenal, xv. 131.)

‘They said that he had been the mildest and gentlest of the
kings of the world.’ (Anglo-Saxon. Praise of the hero in Beo-
wulf, 3180.)

‘When thou cuttest down thine harvest . . . and hast forgot
a sheaf . . . thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for
the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.’ (Ancient
Jewish. Deut. xxiv. 19.)

VIII. The Law of Magnanimity

A.

‘There are two kinds of injustice: the first is found in those
who do an injury, the second in those who fail to protect an-
other from injury when they can.’ (Roman. Gcero, De Off.
1. vii.)

‘Men always knew that when force and injury was offered
they might be defenders of themselves; they knew that howso-
ever men may seek their own commodity, yet if this were done
with injury unto others it was not to be suffered, but by all
men and by all good means to be withstood.’ (English. Hooker,
Laws Qf Eccl. Polity, 1 . ix. 4.)

‘To take no notice of a violent attack is to strengthen the heart
of the enemy. Vigour is valiant, but cowardice is vile.’ (Ancient

6o

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

Egyptian. The Pharaoh Senusert III. cit. H. R. Hall, Ancient
History of the Near East , p. 161.)

'They came to the fields of joy, the fresh turf of the Fortunate
Woods and the dwellings of the Blessed . . . here was the com-
pany of those who had suffered wounds fighting for their fa-
therland.’ (Roman. Virgil, Aen. vi. 638-9, 660.)

'Courage has got to be harder, heart the stouter, spirit the
sterner, as our strength weakens. Here lies our lord, cut to
pieces, our best man in the dust. If anyone thinks of leaving this
battle, he can howl forever.’ (Anglo-Saxon. Maldon , 312.)

'Praise and imitate that man to whom, while life is pleasing,
death is not grievous.’ (Stoic. Seneca, Ep. liv.)

‘The Master said, Love learning and if attacked be ready to
die for the Good Way.’ (Ancient Chinese. Analects , viii. 13.)

B.

‘Death is to be chosen before slavery and base deeds.’ (Roman.
Cicero, De Off . 1. xxiii.)

'Death is better for every man than life with shame.’ (Anglo-
Saxon. Beonmlfy 2890.)

‘Nature and Reason command that nothing uncomely, noth-
ing effeminate, nothing lascivious be done or thought.’ (Roman.
Cicero, De Off . x. iv.)

‘We must not listen to those who advise us “being men to
think human thoughts, and being mortal to think mortal
thoughts,” but must put on immortality as much as is possible
and strain every nerve to live according to that best part of us,
which, being small in bulk, yet much more in its power and
honour surpasses all else.’ (Ancient Greek. Aristotle, Eth. Nic .
1177 B.)

‘The soul then ought to conduct the body, and the spirit of
our minds the soul. This is therefore the first Law, whereby the
highest power of the mind requireth obedience at the hands of
all the rest.’ (Hooker, op. cit 1. viii. 6.)

‘Let him not desire to die, let him not desire to live, let him
wait for his time ... let him patiently bear hard words, en-

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TAO

61

tirely abstaining from bodily pleasures.’ (Ancient Indian. Laws
of Manu. ERE ii. 98.)

‘He who is unmoved, who has restrained his senses ... is
said to be devoted. As a flame in a windless place that flickers
not, so is the devoted.’ (Ancient Indian. Bhagavad gita . ERE
ii. 90.)

C.

‘Is not the love of Wisdom a practice of death?’ (Ancient
Greek. Plato, Phaedo , 81 a.)

‘I know that I hung on the gallows for nine nights, wounded
with the spear as a sacrifice to Odin, myself offered to Myself.’
(Old Norse. Hdvamdl , 1 . 10 in Corpus Poeticum Bore ale; stanza
139 in Hildebrand’s Lieder der Alteren Edda . 1922.)

‘Verily, verily I say to you unless a grain of wheat falls into
the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much
fruit. He who loves his life loses it.’ (Christian. John xii. 24, 25.)